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Mental health disorders are among the leading worldwide causes of disease and long-term disability. This issue has a long and painful history of gradual de-stigmatization of patients, coinciding with humanization of therapeutic approaches. What are the current trends in Russia regarding this issue and in what ways is it similar to and different from Western countries? IQ.HSE provides an overview of this problem based on research carried out by Svetlana Kolpakova.

On September 5, Laurie Manchester, Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, presented her paper on voluntary repatriation of Russians from China to the Soviet Union between 1935 and 1960. The presentation was part of the research seminar, ‘Boundaries of History’, held regularly by the Department of History at HSE University in St. Petersburg. HSE News Service spoke with Laurie Manchester about her research interests, collaborating with HSE faculty members, and the latest workshop.

Dr. Sabyasachi Tripathi, from Kolkata, India, is a new research fellow at HSE University. He will be working at the Laboratory for Science and Technology Studies of the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge.

Article

Вызовы и угрозы постиндустриального развития цивилизации

This article studies challenges and threats in post-industrial development of the civilization. Information challenges include information inequality between countries and regions; information stratification of society; cybercrime; cyberwarfare; difficulty in protection of intellectual property rights, copyright and related rights; increased information and communication threats to privacy; advanced technological capabilities for information manipulation of public opinion. There is a rise in environmental threats, including air pollution and climate change. In future, revolutionary changes in biotechnology and genetic engineering can lead to the social problem of vital inequality causing stratification by the quality of life. Migration as an integral part of globalization brings about new issues of inter-ethnic, inter-confessional and inter-cultural exchange. The rise of Islamism plays an important role in the actualization of this trend. Religious radicalism, of Islamic or any other kind, contributes to the development of terrorism and destruction of internal stability of modern societies. The main political threats of post-industrial transit are separatism, which endangers the stability of public authorities and integrity of the country, and modern terrorism, most common ideological ground of which is religious extremism of Islamic type. Threats and challenges of postindustrial transit bring up the question of whether they can be successfully overcome under the conditions of post-Fordist model of capitalism and whether it can be preserved as the economic basis of the planetary civilization.

The article defines the limits of qualification of terrorist crimes. The author distinguishes them from common criminal offences, sabotage, military crimes and analyzes the notion of “State Terrorism”, stating limits of terrorism from the point of subject of crime.

Focusing on the Muslim populations in five Muslim-majority countries and four Western
European countries, we examine the levels of support for suicide bombings and other forms
of violence. We found that support for terrorism among Muslims is present but the percentage
of radicals is quite low. In both samples, support for terrorism is stronger among those who
see democracy as a solely Western political system. This pattern of association is similar
across the Western European countries, whereas the association varies considerably across the
Muslim countries. The perceived economic dominance of the West is related to more support
for terrorism among Muslims in Europe. In the Muslim countries, blaming the West for
negative international relations is associated with greater support for terrorism. We suggest
that improvement of the relationships between the West and the Muslim world can reduce
support for terrorism and prevent radicalization within Muslim societies.

During the uprisings in 2011 so called Islamist movements and parties entered the political scene in Egypt tending to ﬁ ll the vacuum emerged after Hosny Mubarak’s resignation and National Democratic Party’s dissolution. This new reality made some observers to conclude, that Egypt has been witnessing the formation of a strong and united Islamist camp with a potential to take power to their hands. However, this assumption is unlikely to reﬂ ect the true events. The analyses we have conducted shows, that there has been a rivalry between key actors inside this Islamist camp – the Muslims Brotherhood and Salaﬁ movements. Besides, this article concerns one more Islamic movement, which is often excluded from investigations on contemporary Islamists parties in Egypt – namely, the most active group of Suﬁ s. We argue, that political role of Suﬁ s is unreasonably ignored and thus should be further explored.

The article deals with the processes of building the information society and security in the CIS in accordance with modern conditions. The main objective is to review existing mechanisms for the formation of a common information space in the Eurasian region, regarded as one of the essential aspects of international integration. The theoretical significance of the work is to determine the main controls of the regional information infrastructure, improved by the development of communication features in a rapid process.The practical component consists in determining the future policies of the region under consideration in building the information society. The study authors used historical-descriptive approach and factual analysis of events having to do with drawing the contours of today's global information society in the regional refraction.

The main result is the fact that the development of information and communication technologies, and network resources leads to increased threats of destabilization of the socio-political situation in view of the emergence of multiple centers that generate the ideological and psychological background. Keeping focused information policy can not be conceived without the collective participation of States in the first place, members of the group leaders of integration - Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Currently, only produced a comprehensive approach to security in the information field in the Eurasian region, but the events in the world, largely thanks to modern technology, make the search for an exit strategy with a much higher speed.
The article contributes to the science of international relations, engaging in interdisciplinary thinking that is associated with a transition period in the development of society. A study of current conditions in their relation to the current socio-political patterns of the authors leads to conclusions about the need for cooperation with the network centers of power in the modern information environment, the formation of alternative models of networking, especially in innovation and scientific and technical areas of information policy, and expanding the integration of the field in this region on the information content.

The emergence of the Tea Party movement in recent years has shown that under the surface of mainstream political life in the USA there exists a different layer of ideas, which cannot be satisfactorily described in terms of the Republican/Democrat dichotomy. These ideas have their origins in the foundation of the American Republic, which owes a lot to ancient and mediaeval political theory. In the twentieth century there was a revival of these ideas in the form of the so-called “paleoconservative” movements which rediscovered their ancient and mediaeval heritage. This paper focuses on one of them, the Southern Agrarian movement, as exemplary of this radical intellectual project.

Gerrymandering – the artful and partisan manipulation of electoral districts – is a well known pathology of electoral systems, especially majoritarian ones. In this paper, we try to give theoretical and experimental answers to the following questions: 1) How much biased can the assignment of seats be under the effect of gerrymandering? 2) How effective is compactness as a remedy against gerrymandering? Accordingly, the paper is divided into two parts. In the first one, a highly stylized combinatorial model of gerrymandering is studied; in the second one, a more realistic multiobjective graph-partitioning model is adopted and local search techniques are exploited in order to find satisfactory district designs. In a nutshell, our results for the theoretical model mean that gerrymandering is as bad as one can think of and that compactness is as good as one can think of. These conclusions are confirmed to a large extent by the experimental results obtained with the latter model on some medium-large real-life test problems.